EU faces fierce criticism over plans to host Taliban in Brussels | Women

Rights activists and MEPs have warned that a meeting in Brussels between EU officials and a Taliban delegation risks normalizing a regime that bans sending girls to school after the sixth grade and seeks to erase women from public life, whose ranks include two leaders accused of crimes against humanity.

A. An Afghan foreign ministry spokesman confirmed that a delegation representing the Taliban went to Brussels after the Belgian foreign ministry issued a five-day visa.

This was the first time the EU has hosted the group since the Taliban came to power in 2021.

Tuesday’s agenda includes discussions about the possible resumption of consular services for Afghans in the EU, consular presence, as well as “the need for confidence-building measures”, spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi said in a statement.

The visit was condemned by campaigners who said establishing ties with the Taliban was against the EU’s values. Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by Pakistani Taliban militants at the age of 15, said, “The Taliban has erased women and girls from public life,” adding that she was “shaken and deeply disturbed” by the EU’s invitation.

The commission confirmed weeks ago that it had been in talks with the Taliban since January to discuss how to step up deportations of Afghan migrants.

EU officials’ willingness to cooperate with the Taliban, which will ban women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes in 2024, contrasts sharply with messages from the European parliament, which MEPs have repeatedly supported. Resolutions condemning the regimesaid Socialist Workers Party MP Juan Fernando López Aguilar.

“I was horrified,” he said. “It is an absolute disgrace and a complete loss of trust and credibility in the European Union that it can apply such double standards.”

Two senior Taliban leaders are subject to arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court, which accuses them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls. EU imposed sanctions About many people associated with the regime.

In May, a European Commission spokesman said the meeting with the Taliban had been coordinated with Sweden after 20 member states called for it. concrete roads Deporting Afghans who do not have legal residence permits or who pose a security risk. The spokesman said the talks would focus on how to extradite people who “pose a security threat” to the EU.

The justification was rejected by López Aguilar, who instead accused the EU of allowing the far right and its rhetoric on immigration to set the agenda. “Together, we are 450 million people. There is no need to panic when we say that a certain number of migrants are fleeing out of desperation or lack of opportunity. Let alone the persecution that is the reason for them to seek international protection,” he said. “Migration is not a threat, not even a crisis. It is an immutable fact of human history.”

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have sought asylum in Europe since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. As the discourse around migration hardened, the lives they built across the continent became increasingly precarious; Many EU member states appear ready to ignore the risks of deportation to a country in the grip of a humanitarian and human rights crisis.

According to the International Rescue Committee, approximately 40 percent of the population in Afghanistan is affected by hunger. The situation for women in the country is particularly precarious because they grapple with systemic barriers to education, employment and healthcare.

Lisa Owen, the organisation’s Afghanistan country director, said: “Sending Afghans back to a country where almost half the population cannot feed themselves is not an immigration policy; it is a decision that could cost lives.”

The message resonated in an open letter83 Afghan and international human rights groups have expressed serious concerns about the EU’s intentions. “Afghanistan is currently one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman, and forced repatriation would subject many to persecution, violence and serious deprivation of rights,” the report said.

While the EU said the meeting in no way meant recognition of the Taliban, the situation was much worse, said Shagofah Ghafori of the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies.

“What Brussels is proposing is something more insidious: normalization,” Ghafori said wrote this month. “And normalization does not require a signed agreement. It happens gradually, through the issuance of visas, meeting rooms and the replacement of principle with quiet action.”

A report published last year by the UN It found that many Afghans repatriated, mostly by Pakistan and Iran, were subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and mistreatment by authorities. The findings suggest that deportations to Afghanistan could breach the EU’s obligation under international law to refrain from returning people who risk facing persecution or torture.

This risk was clearly revealed in the charter flight made in coordination with Qatar. Leaving Germany in August 2024 Ghafori said he was carrying 28 Afghan citizens. “There was no credible inspection once the plane landed, and reports indicate that returnees were detained and interrogated, with at least one subsequently killed,” he said. “If the EU continues to deport, it will do so knowing that many of those returned will be thrown into torture cells or mass graves.”

Germany is believed to have deported more than 100 people since August 2024, while Austria also started exiles.

While the European Commission has argued that cooperation with the Taliban is necessary to return convicted criminals to Afghanistan, Rashad Jalali, senior policy analyst at the European Council for Refugees and Exiles, said this could only be the starting point. “The real risk is that once deportations are normalized and restarted between the EU and Taliban de facto authorities, this will lead to broader deportations of Afghans without criminal conviction.”

Earlier this year, an investigative report by German broadcaster ZDF found that deportations to Afghanistan continued to be slow, despite priority being given to people convicted of crimes. was also targeted single Afghan men who have not broken any laws.

Jalali called on the EU to instead work with the international community to hold the Taliban accountable. “The EU’s priority should be to protect Afghans and defend international law, rather than creating pathways that risk legitimizing one of the world’s most abusive regimes.”

German Greens MP Hannah Neumann said on social media that the deportations to Afghanistan were not only a humanitarian failure but also a strategic mistake. “If Europe drives young Afghan men into poverty and despair, many of them will become dependent on the only structures that still offer shelter and food: Taliban networks and madrassas.”

He said any return was a potential boon for the Taliban. “This is how authoritarian systems hold power. Not just through violence, but also through dependency, social control and forced loyalty,” he said. “We are not weakening the Taliban by driving people to despair. We are risking strengthening the structures that keep them in power.”